Episode 141- Time Management with a Newborn – Part 5 – Prioritisation

Good morning lovelies, 

How are you doing today? Ok so we’ve talked about the math needing to add up, a positive mindset with regard to getting things done, knowing when to use “tomorrow” as a reset, and when not to use it as a hopeful strategy, we’ve talked about your self talk and how that impacts what you get done. Today we are talking about the next principle which applies even if you’ve got or not got a newborn baby to care for that’s sucking up your time. 

And that is prioritisation. Knowing what your priorities are. Knowing what is important. What order of things you should be working on. 

It’s so simple. It’s obvious. And it applies even if you don’t use time blocking to plan out your whole week, or even if you don’t schedule your day strictly, and you just go through the day, working in opportune moments – as and when you can grab them. 

It’s one of the most useful and important things you can do – if you want to grow or scale your business, or make more money in the hours you have available. 

Because if we don’t know what our priorities are, if we don’t know what the needlemovers are, if we haven’t consciously decided what order we are doing things in – what tends to happen is this…

You look at that to do list, if you’ve got one, and you either go for the easiest tasks, the quick wins, or the things shouting loudest.

Or if you don’t have a to do list, you do whatever pops into your head when you think about it, or when you see something that reminds you that it needs to be done. Maybe that’s an email, maybe that’s a message or notification, maybe that’s just spotting that basket of laundry that needs doing. 

Which, of course, means that the bigger projects and tasks and the more important things get left untouched. Because your time is being used up on the rest of the stuff. 

Which also means you end up with the same results. Because typically the things that create real progress in your business are those bigger, harder things that are looked over whilst your brain focuses on the easier smaller wins. 

Or – you spin out in overwhelm and completely freeze when you see that list or think of all the things you could be doing, because you are telling yourself it’s all important, it all has to get done, and you want it all done now. And, of course, your brain knows that’s not physically possible so checks out – and usually has you either eating cookies on the couch or finding another task or project that wasn’t even on your list – and has you starting that instead. 

Which again, means the needlemovers, the things that make the biggest difference in your business, the money makers – they all get neglected.

So this is why it is sooo important to first of all really know what the most important things are in your business, what the needlemovers are, what the money makers are, know what your priorities are – in a given day; week or month. 

So that when you have time to work, you are working on them before your time gets eaten up by something else.

Now the challenges with prioritising – and why most business owners who come to work with me are not doing it is as follows: 

1. It requires a bit of time. Not a lot. Certainly not much on an ongoing basis. But a bit of time from the onset to get super clear on what your goal is or your most important project right now – and then what are the needlemovers, what are the money makers, what does work in your business to make you money, to get you sales, or what are the most important things to get you to your goals. So, of course, we have resistance to anything that requires time – when we are already feeling time pressed. We also probably have never slowed down enough to know what is really working, to have done those analyses and evaluations and figured out what are the things that are making the biggest difference. Remember the Pareto Principle – 80% of our results typically come from just 20% of our efforts. 
2. The second challenge is that it all feels important. And we are impatient creatures. We want it all to be done fast. Now. We think it needs to be done now. And fast. And so we have natural resistance to saying one is more important than the other – and pressing pause on the rest. Because we don’t want them to not get done now. 
3. The third challenge is that things that shout loudest seem to look more important than the rest of the more quiet tasks – even when they actually aren’t. 
4. The fourth is that we all have a natural tendency to want to be liked – and so we tend to people-please as an unconscious priority – we put other people’s requests and tasks before our own. 
5. The fifth challenge is that we absolutely want to avoid anything that brings up fear, or anxiety of some sort – and so if there is a hint of us deciding that the scary things are the things that we should be doing before anything else – of course, we will want to avoid prioritising them first. 
6. The sixth challenge – that I’ve already mentioned is our brain is wired to conserve energy and so it will naturally want to do easy, quick wins first – to feel good – and so it will resist picking something else that is harder as the priority. 
7. The seventh challenge – is that prioritising itself is basically making decisions – and this requires our brain to use energy – because we have to weigh up the pros and cons. AND we also want to get it “right” and so if there is any fear in getting it “wrong”, that will have us procrastinating on simply prioritising in the first place. 
8. The last challenge is that if we try to decide in the moment what our priorities are, our brain is likely going to pick the things based on survival now – rather than things that are best for our attainment of our long-term goals. Simply because it values short-term gratification as way more important, than long-term gratification. 

So with this in mind – we can see why we don’t do it. 

And also why we should. 

So here are a few things to consider if you aren’t prioritising right now. 

First of all – pay attention to what happens when you haven’t consciously decided what needs to get done first, and then second, and then third. 

Notice what tasks you end up doing, what tasks end up getting left, and how you feel. 

The best way to sell yourself on taking some time to figure out what your priorities are right now, and on a daily basis – is to notice the cost that comes with not prioritising. 

The next thing, is that prioritising on a weekly and daily basis shouldn’t take much time – if you have clarity on your business goals, and the strategic actions you need to be taking in order to achieve them. 

If you’ve done that strategic thinking work – as the CEO of your business – upfront, there will be very clear indicators of what your weekly priorities should be. 

For example, maybe your business’s priority right now is achieving a monetary goal. And you have a marketing and sales plan that should achieve that – and part of that involves posting on social media three times a week. 

That means that it is a weekly priority to get three posts out – no matter what. So if you are going to do a post a day for three days – on those three days, that is the number 1 thing you want to get done. 

As for the other tasks in your business that also have to get done – like responding to client queries, working on delivering a good service, sorting out your finances, checking emails, doing admin…etc.

This is where having clear systems in place and detailed obvious processes mapped out, and allocated spaces in your calendar for different the types of tasks that need to be attended to regularly, is useful. And negates the need to have to decide what the order of priorities are on any given day. 

For example, if your standard marketing system involves the creation and recording and release of a podcast every week, then you already have a clear priority each week – to get that done – and hopefully a space allocated and protected for it in your calendar. 

As for the rest of the things that crop up, like fighting fires – you always want to be figuring out how to eliminate those from popping up and working on doing that – so they get fewer and fewer. 

And then you will be left with only a few things that you have to choose between and make an order of. So prioritising on a daily basis won’t take long at all. 

And to do that – there are a few different strategies you can use to help you figure out what should be done first, next, and after that…

The first is to categorise them into urgent & important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and then not urgent and not important – in line with the Eisenhower matrix. 

In an ideal world, you would prioritise the urgent and important things FIRST, then move onto important but not urgent, you would delegate the urgent but not important and you would get rid of the need to do the non-urgent and non-important things. 

If you’ve struggled to use the Eisenhower Matrix before – maybe it seems too clunky, or cumbersome, or time consuming. 

Think of working through it like this…

Are any of these things due right now? Is there a pressing deadline for them? Does it matter if they get don’t get done right away? Is there a consequence to putting them off? 

That will help you first identify what is urgent and what isn’t. 

Once you’ve nailed down to those urgent things – you are then looking for high value vs low value tasks. 

So – you could ask yourself will this task help take me closer to achieving my business goal? Will it help make the boat go faster? Will this improve my business in some way? Will this task have a high positive impact if I get it done? These are the important things. 

Low-value tasks, unimportant things don’t make much of a difference. 

And if you are struggling with identifying which is which – imagine you are going to be paying someone a decent wage to do the task in front of you. Would them doing it directly add value to the business? In terms of a return in revenue. Or a direct reduction in expenses. Or time taken to achieve a sale? Would it be worth paying someone else to do it? That usually helps you weed out the important from the un-important. 

For example, you might think making super nice graphics on Canva is important for your marketing – but if you were to think about paying someone else to do it – would them making pretty graphics directly contribute to higher revenue? Probably not. 

Another really simple strategy you can use to figure out what you should be prioritising first is to use the concept “the ONE thing”, from Gary W keller and Jay Papasan – where you are essentially looking for the ONE thing that if you did it, would make everything else either easier or unnecessary. 

The more times you can do that – the better. 

Another strategy is to ask yourself – if I could ONLY do ONE thing today – what should that be? That is your number 1. So cross that off the list. 

Then repeat the question with the rest of the list – that is your number 2. 

And then again – to find your number 3. 

If you are scheduling your time into a calendar – you can then look to see when you are going to work on each one – and schedule it in order of the priorities. 

To make sure you then focus on those core 3 – you want to give yourself permission to put the rest of those to-do’s on a to-be-done-later list. Or you want to schedule them for after you have completed the top 3 priorities. 

And lastly, make sure that when you are figuring out what your priorities are for the week or day, and ordering them, and putting them on your schedule, and deciding what NOT to do – make sure you are doing all of this the day before you are due to be working on them. 

Because this is when it is easier for us to have perspective, to not get overwhelmed, to think calmly and strategically about the best action plan for us – using our prefrontal cortex – rather than be in reactive survival mode where our primitive brain is deciding for us. 

Ok that’s it for prioritising. If you aren’t doing this as a minimum – just taking a moment to decide what the most urgent and important things are to get done first – make sure you give it a go, so that the limited time you do have – is spent on the right things, not spinning out in overwhelm, and not doing something not even on your list. 

And if you don’t have a business goal defined, or a strategy to achieve it with, or mapped out systems and processes – so this task of prioritising seems impossible because all of your to-do’s are just a jumble of tasks in one of your 150 paper planners or journals – then make sure you book a call with me to talk about working together – because I can help you with all of this. Just go to my Instagram bio at Kirsty Knight Coaching – click on book a free consult and I look forward to speaking with you. 

Have a fabulous week. 

See you next time.